Also, many people look for normalised citations : you divide citations of paper by the number of authors. (ADS will give you this.) Thats still not right, but better. A selection panel will often start by counting papers, and then citations, but then to really sort out the sheep from the goats, they look to see if someone has a few single author papers or papers with only two or three authors.

I actually think the citation index is healthier than the way it was at the beginning of my career, when sheer number of papers was what counted most. At least now there is some pressure to produce work that somebody actually reads.

Amanda – I have no idea why journals don’t do double-blind refereeing. There’s this editorial on the Nature page with lots of interesting reader comments. On the one hand there seems to be evidence of bias in single-blind peer review, on the other lots of people who think it wouldn’t make a difference anyway…. Had a quick look at ApJ and they have no mention of it in their editorial and ethis policies. I might try to follow up on that.

Rob – firstly, *blush*. Second, no I would hope no one does that! About the age correction, I have a friend who did calculate some kind of age-normalised citation index for all the faculty of our home institute and basically/weirdly found that they were all pretty much identical; and the one positive outlier was by no means the most influential scientist of the department. Should ask him what it was he calculated…

why are journals not using the double-blind method now?

I took my name off several papers produced in a collaboration because I didn’t feel that I had contributed to those papers specifically. This is bad for me but I think it is the right thing to do. As you say, there is an incentive to add authors to your paper so that the favour will be returned. Perhaps this should be discouraged by reducing the weight of a paper by the number of authors.

Given the many ways the systems can be gamed, I find it difficult to take citation indexes, RAE scores, or league tables any more seriously than a Channel 4 Top 100 programme.

i’ve seen people try every trick in the book to raise their h index. i’ve tried a few myself too! but i don’t think anyone has deliberately published a mistake to get cited, have they?

one nutty thing about the h index is the lack of correction for age. another interesting thing about it: when you reach 20 or so you begin thinking “if this paper isn’t good enough to get 20+ citations, i might as well not bother”… usually a good thing, but not so good if people don’t publish their non-detections and others spend gazillions repeating the same experiment.